How to stop adulterated turmeric from killing people
141–150 of 200 posts
Re: How to stop adulterated turmeric from killing people
#142Title is misleading: it's lead chromate (that producers mix into turmeric power) that does the killing, not turmeric.
Ok, we've adulterated the title above.
Re: How to stop adulterated turmeric from killing people
#143This article might be paywalled, but contamination and adulterants are covered, as well as independent lab analysis of some of the products on the market.
https://www.consumerlab.com/reviews/turmeric-curcumin-supple...
Re: How to stop adulterated turmeric from killing people
#144> Yet adulterated turmeric looks like a major culprit almost everywhere, chiefly owing to poor practice in India, which produces 75% of the spice. It’s really shocking to me that in the year 2023 people could be intentionally adding lead to food products at this scale. Is this mainly due to greed and corruption? Ignorance? Distrust of modern medicine and health advice? I suppose it’s similar to the problem of people…
It is reminiscent of the Austrian antifreeze wine scandal: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_Austrian_diethylene_gly... That was only a few wineries though, and it was pretty quickly caught and harshly punished. This is apparently a whole industry where the practice of poisoning consumers with lead is normalized.
That's insane:
> Simple sweetening (also illegal) would not necessarily do the job since it would not sufficiently correct the taste profile of the wine. By using diethylene glycol (DEG), it was possible to affect both the impression of sweetness and the body of the wine. German wine chemists have stated that it is unlikely that an individual winemaker of a small winery had sufficient chemical knowledge to devise the scheme, implying that the recipe must have been drawn up by a knowledgeable wine chemist consulting for a large-scale producer.
> Most of the recalled wines contained up to a few grams of DEG per litre (and many only a fraction of a gram), which meant that dozens of bottles would have to be consumed in a limited period to reach the lethal dose of approximately 40 grams. However, in one record-setting wine (a 1981 Welschriesling Beerenauslese from Burgenland), 48 grams per litre was detected, which meant that the consumption of a single bottle could have been lethal. Also, long-term consumption of DEG is known to damage the kidney, liver, and brain.
> The industry's practice of DEG adulteration was traced back to Otto Nadrasky, a 58-year-old chemist and wine consultant from Grafenwörth, Lower Austria.
It boggles my brain that a professional chemist could recommend winemakers incorporate an actual poison into their wine. And it's not like this was some unknown substance -- it's literally the harmful chemical that was the impetus to found the FDA back in 1938! In a way, it's the poster child for a harmful adulterant [1].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diethylene_glycol#1937_%E2%8...
Re: How to stop adulterated turmeric from killing people
#145> Yet adulterated turmeric looks like a major culprit almost everywhere, chiefly owing to poor practice in India, which produces 75% of the spice. It’s really shocking to me that in the year 2023 people could be intentionally adding lead to food products at this scale. Is this mainly due to greed and corruption? Ignorance? Distrust of modern medicine and health advice? I suppose it’s similar to the problem of people…
It is reminiscent of the Austrian antifreeze wine scandal: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_Austrian_diethylene_gly... That was only a few wineries though, and it was pretty quickly caught and harshly punished. This is apparently a whole industry where the practice of poisoning consumers with lead is normalized.
And poisons added to henna for Westerners because they think normal brown henna tattoos are less genuine.
Re: How to stop adulterated turmeric from killing people
#146> To heighten their colour, the rhizomes from which the spice is extracted are routinely dusted with lead chromate, a neurotoxin. The practice helps explain why South Asia has the highest rates of lead poisoning in the world. The turmeric is not to blame here. It’s the idiots that demand bright yellow food without regard to whether it is poison, and the disgusting people who manufacture said poison to meet that deman…
> It’s the idiots that demand bright yellow food without regard to whether it is poison
In nature, color very often corresponds to freshness (which corresponds to flavor). It's not that consumers are being idiots, it's that they're looking for something fresh.
The fault is 100% with manufacturers here. There is no excuse to blame consumers whatsoever.
Re: How to stop adulterated turmeric from killing people
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was at an all-boys boarding school in the 70s when a bottle of phenylphthalein went missing. They shut the whole school down until it reappeared (it was left on the windowsill of a teacher's house IIRC). No idea what the culprit was intending to do with it. Put it in the tea urn and try to make the whole school shit itself to death?
"...a bottle of phenylphthalein went missing" Uh? What was the big deal? We had bottles of phenylphthalein in the school lab and no one cared a damn about it or whether any went missing because it was so commonly available and so cheap. And most of us had phenylphthalein at home in our medicine chests in name of Ford Pills. When TV ads told us to take it to 'keep fit and regular' it was just something one was used to…
>What was the big deal?
I wasn't party to the decision making. But imagine the staff were a bit twitchy about what a malicious teenager could do with a whole bottle of the stuff. And what else they might do if they got away stealing the phenylphthalein.
Re: How to stop adulterated turmeric from killing people
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was at an all-boys boarding school in the 70s when a bottle of phenylphthalein went missing. They shut the whole school down until it reappeared (it was left on the windowsill of a teacher's house IIRC). No idea what the culprit was intending to do with it. Put it in the tea urn and try to make the whole school shit itself to death?
Interesting, when I was in school the preferred way to shut the school down was to call in a bomb threat from a pay phone
That's stupid and infantile and would get everyone offside. However there was one incident of notoriety that occurred about a year after I left school (so I take no credit for it nor would I've bothered) but the details weren't spared on me by someone who was still there.
We had a Kipp's generator (aka apparatus), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kipp%27s_apparatus, in the school chemistry lab (it was a well equipped school with separate physics chemistry and biology labs). Anyway, the Kipp's generator was mainly used for making H2S and was used in a properly equipped fume cupboard with a decent exhaust.
During the last day of term (muck-up day for final year students) some bright sparks decided to remove the generator from the lab and stick it in the airconditioning ducts with the view of stinking the whole school out.
Trouble was the science wasn't well thought out, they'd not calculated how much H2S would be required to produce an objectionable effect. From what I gather the odor was so minimal that the perpetrators who were looking for the odor could barely detect it.
BTW, everyone at school was taught [as part of the curriculum] the dangers of H2S and that after a certain threshold concentration it anesthetizes the nose so one thinks the concentration has fallen and that is why it's so dangerous.
Re: How to stop adulterated turmeric from killing people
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
No comment on economic theory, but on the carbon monoxide thing, the issue here isn't its toxicity, but that vendors use it to mask the color appearance of non-fresh, unhygienic meat. Naive visual assessment is wrong.
I thought meat was more tasty/tender when it's "aged" for a while anyways.
It has to be aged correctly to be safe.
Re: How to stop adulterated turmeric from killing people
#150> Yet adulterated turmeric looks like a major culprit almost everywhere, chiefly owing to poor practice in India, which produces 75% of the spice. It’s really shocking to me that in the year 2023 people could be intentionally adding lead to food products at this scale. Is this mainly due to greed and corruption? Ignorance? Distrust of modern medicine and health advice? I suppose it’s similar to the problem of people…
> I suppose it’s similar to the problem of people dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, no it isn't
Right, it isn't. In fact, many potent greenhouse gasses such as many fluorocarbons are the least toxic of all chemicals (which was one of the their main virtues and why they were used).
Their problem is not toxicity but greenhouse warming - an altogether different mechanism.